Under The Mountain is dead! Long live Under The Mountain!
A blog of legendary status throughout many years into the past, it seems that it has almost completely ceased to exist recently. For whatever reason, some months ago the whole section hosting the Confrontation model images has disappeared from the blog. I initially thought that maybe this was due to Monolith acquiring Rackham rights and the establishment of the new Rackham Games and that perhaps the UtM owner was simply afraid of any potential legal action by the new owners. When you think about it, this wouldn't make sense due to Fair Use rights, since UtM made no profit off of the images, nor claimed them as their own. In any case, a few weeks ago I revisited the site and now it seems that all of the content from it has been removed and only an empty page greets you when you visit the blog.
Regardless of the reason, this is a severe loss to the Confrontation resource pool since it preserved a lot of precious information from the game's heyday. I've spent countless hours browsing through it and it has singlehandedly kept my interest in Rackham creations strong in the years before I got personally invested in Confrontation. It was always such a simple pleasure to browse through all the model images hosted there.
Of course, everything is still accessible via the Wayback Machine, but it is definitely not an optimal solution and you never know when that might get scrubbed away as well. But as Christopher Paolini writes, "...years pass whether we will them or not… but we can remember," and remember we will. And not only that, but we should continue the legacy established by our predecessors.
With this in mind, I want to use my blog and continue carrying the torch of usefulness for the community. And since UtM was, among many other things, most famous for hosting images of all of the Confrontation models, this is where I will also start. This has been something that I've wanted to do for a long while and now is finally the time.
On the right side pane you will find links to Model Galleries of specific factions. For now it only features the three Elven factions (Akkyshan, Cynwäll, Daïkinee), but I will make an effort to periodically add more to it. The miniature entries have a recognizable format previously established by UtM, but I've so far tried to fill in some gaps with additional information from other resources where possible.
This will be a continual work in progress and in some way I would like this to be a community endeavor. If you spot that any information is wrong, or there is something crucial that I've missed adding, or you have a suggestion on how to further expand the entries, please feel free to get in touch. I am in no way anywhere close to being a Rackham scholar and historian, as some members of the community certainly are, so it would be great to get some feedback in order to make all of this useful for other people, especially those new to the hobby.
As always, thanks for reading and I hope you stick around!
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